Slashdot Mirror
Borland Announces the Return of the Turbo Products, with Video
Leonel writes "Borland Software's Developer Tools Group just announced the return of the Turbo line of products. With free and cheap versions, it's aimed at students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals. More information is available at the the Turbo Explorer website, including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan."
Last night, I was digging around on the Borland site to see if there was such a thing as this, and today they announce it. How's that for a co-incidence!
:)
I'll certainly be interested to look at these though. Free things are ALWAYS good
Interesting that the Borland tools are being released close to the end of the free year of MS's Express line (ending in Nov. I believe). Could Borland be preparing to take on the MS developer tool chain again?
/.) tool chain. It'll be fun to see if Borland can bring anything new and unique to compete with the VS Express Editions.
Considering that Visual Studio is a highly evolved (I know, this is ALWAYS open for debate on
My enterprise was based on Borland C++ in the last 10 years.
But this seems to be the last desperate ad before the collapse: the feature list contains no news at all - all of it should have been in Borland IDEs years ago.
Instead of chewing new buzzwords, the daily used tools should have been cleaned up first: Borland C++ Builder 6 behaves terribly even on medium size projects, (crashes, tons of bugs, etc.)
If Borland had a yearly update, I would be their greatest fun.
If Kylix would have been developed further, I would pay for it, because we need cross-platform Linux tools...
So many dead tools...
Nothing to see here, man, move away... to Qt, for example.
It is today's Borland. And shines.
But because it provides a steady release cycle, people will buy it, even if it is pricey.
Your motivation? How is productivity as a motivation?
Delphi has been my tool of choice for the last 11 years. It remains the
most productive development tool I have used.
Agile processes? Well, the build on a Delphi project is so quick, you
don't have time to fill your coffee cup, much less drink it. So build/test
cycles are fast.
The language is powerful, and a great foundation for those who choose to
move to C#. The learning curve on C#, coming from Delphi, is pretty shallow.
But please, stay with your g++, and those glacially slow builds. I don't
need more competition.
--- Bill
Wow -- what an impressive display of negativity!
Some of the first code I wrote under DOS used Turbo C 1.0. Still have the manuals around here somewhere...
I still have a soft spot for the Brief editor (which Borland acquired at some point from UnderWare), too. Some of my most productive coding was done under Brief + dBrief...
I don't get it. Why does everyone want new tools all the time. Windows is still windows, A button is still a button and the communication protocols are supported accross the development platforms.
.net platform leaves them with very little working power. There all stressed and tearing their hair out when a server spits blood because they can't see inside!
I have been working with Delphi since version 3 and still tackle new projects today with Delphi 6 (Don't want the newer and slower Visual Studio lookalike IDE).
Here at work I am cracking up lauging these days. Most of the dev team have moved to gadget-land using Visual Studio and C#. As a result they need to upgrade all the dev machines (Again) and find out that the resources sucked up by the bloatware
In the mean time our old and trusty properly hand coded applications keep scaling up on ever more powerful hardware showing there is many more years of use in the old and proven.
I believe I am more productive using Delphi today than a whole line up of fancy Microsoft fanboy developers because I have access to absolutely amazing free library source code build and refined by users over the years. A massive Delphi and Windows API knowledge base indexed by Google newsgroups, a solid grounded knowledge of my tools and libraries and last but not least a very supportive Delphi user base.
I hope this Turbo initiative will bring more developers to their senses and start coding again instead of playing with shiny black box Microsoft crap.
I started using Delphi a bit late in the game. A few years ago I chose Delphi 6 because it looked pretty decent and I liked the way it simplified the Win32 API in such a way that we could get to developing software without too much hassle. Delphi 7 came along which I passed over because I wanted to wait for Delphi 8 and jump on the .NET bandwagon. When Delphi 8 came out I bought it...
.NET haters who constantly preach about how they don't use dot garbage and claim that native code is the best. My reply to those people is that if you don't understand the advantages of .NET over native code then you have no business writing software.
... again.
... which was the biggest mistake I ever made. Delphi 8 was a such a POS I was shocked that people actually released software that bad. Like they say in Southpark, "You see, I learned a lesson today..." and boy did I learn it good.
Ever since then Borland has been spiralling downwards into oblivion. Their best engineers walked out causing them to lag behind never being able to catch up again. Delphi 2005 was a POS and Delphi 2006 needed a couple patches before it actually worked. I never even bothered to upgrade and no I haven't tried the demos and no I don't give a shit.
I regulary check out the borland.public.delphi.non-technical to see what's going on in Delphiland. Half the comments are from
The other half of the comments are from the Delphi evangelists clinging on to the vain hope that Delphi will some day come back to its glory days and be the top IDE once more. All I can say to them is... can you feel the water around your ankles yet?
The only chance that Delphi has is pure and unconditional open source. I've suggested open sourcing Delphi several times but always my suggestions have fallen on deaf ears. I get short-sighted replies such as "and how can Borland earn their money"? and "oooh.. I hope not!". Too bad because it's been proven time and again that money can be made with Open Source and Borland is precisely at the right time at the right place to pull it off. Oh well, I guess they're going to miss the boat
END OF RANT
The think I most fondly remember about Borladn was their no-nonsense user license. Instead of 20 pages of legalspeak, they had two or three paragraphs that said "Don't copy this, don't give it to your friends. you know you want to be nice, but we'd like to stay in business."
It was very human and gave a good first impression.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
FWIW, I was a college freshman and my first programming class was "Programming Concepts Using Pascal". Rather than use the university's mini-computer (horrible edit and compile environment), I wanted something I could use on a PC. Other Pascal compilers at that time were prohibitively priced for a student at hundreds/thousands of dollars. A friend pointed me to Turbo Pascal and I bought my own copy at Egghead for under $90. My very first software purchase by the way. I was a loyal fan following the product line from TP3->TP4->TC1->TC2->TP5->TC++1->BC++2->BC++4->BC5+ +.
With every iteration, they got a little more expensive even for loyal customers. Then they brought out the "Professional" versions and wanted more money - so I stopped.
How does this relate? TP3 let me do everything and anything I wanted (no-nonsense license) at an expensive (for me) but reasonable price. For the hobbyist or beginner, they will get frustated very quickly with the limitations imposed by the free editions but balk at paying $500 for a professional license. Offer them the professional level software with a no-nonsense license for $99 and Borland may see things turn around.
Here's the deal. Borland dev tool's have been becoming 'has been' for a while, despite generally superior quality, due to years of management fubar's - beginning with Inprise. Borland management's focus is now "ALM" tools, which have been siphoning profits from products like Delphi for at least a couple of years.
The dev tools division has been up for sale for a while - six months or so. During that time, 'DevCo' has been operating somewhat independently from Borland and has produced a couple of major service packs for Delphi and has been hiring talent. And now has come up with these Turbo tools.
Most veteran Borland dev tool customers are excited and optimistic about DevCo. 'Turbo' type tools have been something long requested. Updating the VCL and providing a D64 compiler seem to be more than a pipe dream now.
DevCo had announced that they had a buyer *before* the Turbo tools were announced. According to DevCo staff, an announcement about the buyer is imminent.
Borland can cater to the ether-land of *ALM*, DevCo will (hopefully) again give attention to Borland's traditional customers who just want kick-ass dev tools.
More info at the borland.public.delphi.non-technical.
Microsoft started offering top people $1m/year salaries to snag them. While this seems like the market working, it's not quite real when Microsoft can use its massive cash reserves to cripple a company. Basically, if Microsoft can offer 20 key people $1m/year over market salaries, then the competition is either bled for $20m/year, which can destroy smaller competition, and hasn't cost Microsoft a dollar, or they spend $20m to put a competitor out of business by stealing key people and use their cash to establish a monopoly position.
This is blatantly anti-trust in the case of a monopolist, and was a lawsuit that I believe Microsoft settled.
Borland made some boneheaded management maneuvers, but this was after Microsoft crippled the company, and Borland made a desperate effort to recover.
Alex